Unless you're an Aaron Sorkin completist, Sportsnight, which he wrote before The West Wing, will probably have passed you by. A fine, if flawed, sitcom that has been screened only fleetingly in the UK, it is set in the studios of a nightly cable sports show, where earnest, fast-talking liberals pace purposefully down corridors being unfeasibly witty, then lapsing into sententious guff. In other words, if you're reading this paper, it's a must.

Anyway, there's a very endearing episode where one of the new production staff has to cut a 30-second highlights tape of a league game for their regular baseball round-up. His final version runs to eight and a half minutes. "Make it shorter!" demands his boss. The newbie looks dumbfounded. "But I can't imagine what I'd cut!"

Call me a geek – and people often do – but his bafflement makes perfect sense to me. It's impossible to appreciate a sporting contest properly from a montage of moments, however well selected. I can see that highlights have their value. The Sunday morning repeat of Match of the Day is the obvious example: well may a football fan, catching up on an entire day's matches over breakfast in bed, stop to consider whether civilisation could reach any higher. But personally, I've never really warmed to the idea of highlights. When you watch them you are, by very definition, missing out on something, and that sticks in my craw. I consume those shrink-wrapped packages as reluctantly as Jamie Oliver shipwrecked with a crate of Turkey Twizzlers.

Which is why, every morning of the Brisbane Test, I could be found hunched forward on the sofa, my eyes wildly scanning the screen as I tried to watch six hours of cricket in fast‑forward. It's the only compromise that I can live with for my all-time favourite sporting event, since staying up all night is impractical for those of us with office jobs (when you fall asleep at your desk, the drool tends to short-circuit the keyboard). So I have embraced the almost infinite capacity of my digital recorder and now record each day's play in its entirety, ready to be sped through at the touch, or four, of a button.

You might assume that such an approach would be profoundly unsatisfying. (My own teenage self would have howled at the blasphemy, but then she trained her bladder to take lightning loo-breaks in between overs, so she can pipe down.) On the contrary, there's something hugely involving about the process of watching cricket on fast forward. It requires that you attune yourself to the ebb and flow of the game, and draw on your knowledge and experience to figure out when a wicket's likely to come, and when you can afford to hit the x30. When Shane Watson's bowling, for instance.

Then there's the physical challenge, which for those of us whose video gaming history ended with the ZX Spectrum is particularly real. To negotiate a tricky afternoon session you need deft thumb work and the trigger reflex of Butch Cassidy (Peter Siddle's hat-trick on the first day required near‑psychic powers). Who needs a Wii when you've got interactivity like this?

So much more efficient than a traditional highlights package, too! You can reduce waste with the fat-trimming fury of a Tory home secretary. Start with the run-ups – you can save about an hour there alone. Alastair Cook's hit a straight drive? No need to watch the ball trundle its way to the long-off boundary when you can have it speed to its inevitable destination like a rocket unleashed from James Bond's DB7. No cutaways to sponsor's airships; no lingering shots of bikini babes. Sky's irritating and pointless fetish for super slow-mo is rendered satisfyingly null. Michael Holding's commentary is wiped out at a stroke. And the oh-so-cheeky antics of the Barmy Army, now delivered as silent comedy, are finally funny.

Plus you can be as partisan as you like. After all, not even the Aussies really think that watching Mike Hussey bat is a highlight. If you spool through an England batting collapse fast enough, it doesn't really exist; you can rewrite history so that the first Test was a one‑sided affair in which Steven Finn played a starring role.

There are flaws to the fast-forward strategy. It can, for instance, raise worried looks from family or flatmates when they pop into the living room at 8am looking for their keys, and you jump guiltily, still in your PJs, with your finger hovering over the pause button. Also, after some experimentation, I can confirm it doesn't work for every sport. Rugby, for instance, becomes a frantic game of British bulldog punctuated by a series of group hugs. And while a bad football match can be greatly improved with judicious use of the fast-forward button, good football starts to look like a demonstration game of Tetris. Try it with Barcelona's 5-0 over Real Madrid and you'll see what I mean.

But for a five-day Test it's perfect. Give it a go and by the end of the Ashes you'll have the manual dexterity of a 14-year-old on a text-only contract.